General Question

Considering the ongoing events in Japan, where do you sit on the nuclear power issue?

The pro-nuclear power people are pointing to the fact that even with a station built in the 60’s we have still so far averted catastrophic failure and the anti-nuclear people are saying it proves it can never be safe. Which side of the fence do you sit? Or are you firmly on it?

58 Answers

I see your question as a comparative to two other situations.

First, when you compare auto crashes to airplane crashes, it’s much safer to fly than it is to drive.

Second, how many incidents of nuclear power stations have been recorded? The station, built in Japan in the 60s, apparently has had a clean record of mishaps for fifty years. If you weigh the benefits, compared to the safety involved, it’s a no-brainer.

@john65pennington has it spot on. Nothing can ever be entirely safe. Wind power has been responsible for more deaths per terrawatt-hour produced than nuclear power by significant amount but you don’t see people running about screaming in the streets demanding we ban dangerous wind turbines.

We need electrical power. If we can take that as a given, then I invite you to compare the total cost of nuclear power to the total cost of coal, oil, gas, or any other power-generation method in wide use.
By total cost, I mean total. Take into account lives lost, acres ruined, tonnes of poison in the atmosphere, fish killed, and so forth. I think you will find that nuclear has a pretty good ratio when compared to any other method.

@jca “fallout” is something that results from nuclear weapons, not power plants. Nuclear plants produce waste, but that waste is localized and can be (somewhat) safely stored. Also, that waste might potentially prove valuable later.

I’d love for a plant to be built across the street from my property. Great jobs and affordable energy would be a boost to the local economy. Lines for applicants looking for good jobs would be as long as a Wal-Mart opening. A few protestors would also be good for a few laughs.

Where do I sit on nuclear power? That reminds me of an old Bloom County comic, where a political candidate was asked how he stands on nuclear waste, it showed him balancing on one tip-toe.

Nuclear power is the future, but we have to be smarter about where to place them. Diablo Canyon is near an earthquake fault, but they say it is engineered to withstand an 8.0. They have it on an ocean bluff, so it should be tsunami proof. I hope they got it right.

I think even pro-nuclear activists will no longer support nuclear power plants operating right next to the Pacific Ring of Fire, the most active and dangerous tectonic area in the world. Scientists have long known that about every 20 years a 9.0 or stronger earthquake does occur. They have predicted the “Big One” with likelihoods attached for any given period of time. We cannot afford to ignore their warnings.

@Lightlyseared – It’s different. Plants can remove CO2 from our atmosphere. Practically nothing can change the long half lives of dangerous radioactive isotopes dispersed over large areas of our planet. And it’s a myth that the only realistic alternative to nuclear power is burning coal.

Well, I wouldn’t call myself a pro nuclear activist, however, nuclear power is a whole heck of a lot cleaner than many alternatives, coal for example.

Even the “green” alternatives are not as green as you might think. Producing solar cells is a major manufacturing effort and it has not been until recently that we have been able to produce cells that are efficient enough to balance out the expense (in both dollars and environmental impact) of their production.

Wind power is excellent from an environmental standpoint, but it takes one heck of a lot of windmills to power a country.

Then there is the whole bio-fuel thing. I think that using agricultural waist to produce electricity is a great idea, but the bottom line is this generally involves burning it, which isn’t a whole lot better than burning fossil fuels from an emissions standpoint.

I have to admit that watching the situation at the Daiichi Plant unfold has made me change my position from pro to anti nuclear power. This is based not only on all that has gone wrong at Daiichi but on what I have now learned about nuclear power generation. I’ve been studying up on it voraciously. I’ve learned that the KW hour costs for nuclear are far in excess of all other power generation methods. The US government has given sweetheart tax deals and subsidies to the nuclear industry to make it possible to build and operate the plants we have. That costs all taxpayers for the profit of a specific industry. Better to let the market decide which technology is best.

There are a number of plants in the US built on or immediately adjacent to fault lines. The Diablo Canyon Plant in Avila Beach, CA is 3 miles from an offshore fault line and perched on the edge of a cliff. That’s much closer to the fault line than Daiichi was to the fault that slipped offshore in Japan.

A spokesman for the nuclear industry said on TV that the plant was designed for the worst possible case, but that statement is patently absurd from a scientific viewpoint. We have about 60 years of accurate, worldwide data on the intensity and behavior of earthquakes. Before that time, seismographs were not very accurate and were not widely dispersed around the entire globe. Even low accuracy machines date back only about 100 years. So we have no earthly idea what Mother Nature can throw at us in the 1,000 year or 10,000 year event. A sufficiently large earthquake could cause the whole ledge the Diablo Canyon plant is sitting on to break off and crash into the canyon below.

We have enough wind power in the central US alone to power the entire USA. We can use tidal power. Those technologies are essentially free after the initial investment, but they require that we upgrade to a smart grid to smooth delivery as winds and tides rise and fall. We would be better advised to invest in smart grid technology than in using massive taxpayer support just because the nuclear industry wants the money.

Gas burns clean and is abundantly available in the US. No new technology is needed to use gas. It’s cost per KW hour is far, far below that of nuclear power generation. It is true that gas can cause an explosion but when it does explode, it kills only a few people and is rapidly handled. There is no dispersal of deadly materials.

A nuclear catastrophe can leave a large area uninhabitable for 350,000 years and drive cancer and infant mortality rates through the sky for thousands of miles around. It simply is not worth it till we develop safer, cheaper nuclear technology.

@mattbrowne As @Lightlyseared notes, clean coal is a marketing jingle and as of today, nothing more. Coal fired power plants in the US have been fitted with fly-ash containment, but estimates still say that 2,000 Americans die each year of respiratory disease due to pollution from coal-fired electric power generation. Trapping fly ash doesn’t render it innocuous, either. On Dec. 24, 2008 a fly-ash pond in Harriman, Tennessee broke its retaining wall and flooded 400 acres of the town with up to 6 feet of toxic sludge. Fortunately everyone survived, but their property is uninhabitable and will be so for decades.

All methods of power generation have environmental footprints. Some are just considerably smaller than others. Nuclear power generation is very clean except for the rare occasion when an accident occurs—but when that does happen it can be dirty beyond belief.

If you look at what has happnend at Fukushima (without trying to outdo the tabloids on the hysteria front) its a pretty big win for nuclear power. Those reactors have withstood the fifth biggest known earth quake, a tsunami and the complete failure of all 3 backup cooling systems and the only radioactive material released from the reactors (so far- admitedly) is nitrogen 16 which has a half life of about 8 seconds. According to the IAEA only person who has sustained any measurable extra radiation dose above normal is a plant worker who suffered exposure equal to about 10 per cent of a normal year’s background radiation dose. (For reference a single CT colonography exposes you to about 8 times a years background dose).

Hmm.. a properly run plant that has stood up better than the entire countryside surrounding it and not majorly failed despite a natural disaster that is historic in scope… I feel even more confident about nuclear power than I did before.

That said, that only applies to the concept. Certain designs, locations, regulatory agencies, and plants make me retain some degree of skepticism. But overall, I believe that as bad as the possible effects of an accident are, we are good enough at avoiding and mitigating stuff that I know for a fact that nuclear power can be done safely, even in the face of catastrophe.

@mattbrowne Last I checked, the cancer and birth defect rates around Chernobyl are back to about where they were before the disaster. Yeah, things got a little dicey for a few years, but honestly, the average X-ray tech is exposed to more radiation by 9AM than most people are all week. Another one of my Navy buds was a reactor operator for over two decades and was exposed to less radiation than a day at the beach despite sleeping right next to the reactor for a few years.

Modern human society is addicted to power. We need a lot of reliable power. Solar, wind, coal burning and dam power plants don’t generate enough needed power. If we eliminate all nuclear units around the world then we would be safe from an occasional meltdown but we would have to all live with 3rd world conditions like rolling power outages. Nothing in this world is 100% safe. Driving a car on the freeway is far more dangerous to your health than a nuclear power unit.

I am not totally against nuclear power. It has a place in the way we manage our power needs and at this point, I don’t think we have a perfect environmentally safe/sufficiently effective method of power production. Japan is a major industrial nation with a large population, huge power need and limited geographic space.Tthe alternative of say coal fired power stations would not be a great option either in terms of pollution/use of fossil fuels. In saying that, I do think care has to be taken about where nuclear power stations are situated and Japan is an earthquake prone zone. The “big” earthquake they have been preparing for has apparently not yet happened. I think the Japanese government is a little between a rock and a hard place though.

@jerv – You’re comparison with average natural radiation levels do not tell the whole story. It’s not just about gamma rays and relatively harmless alpha rays in our environment. It’s also about radioactivity entering the human body. And this is still a huge issue because of Chernobyl.

@mattbrowne If we are going to bring human suffering into the argument – coal mining and coal power stations are resonpsinble for more cancer deaths annually than chenobyl caused. The problem is humans are very poor at differentiating between perceived risk and actual risk. Yes, the absolute worst case senario with nuclear is bad but the probablity of that happening is incredibly small. The absolute worst case with coal power (continuing the example) may not be so bad but the risk of it happening is much greater. Safety is the number one concern at a nuclear power station because it is perceived as dangerous so every possible precaution to limit the risk is taken. Coal power on the other hand is seen as much safer so there is less pressure to take costly safety precautions.

The fukushima incident will be respnosible for untold enviromental harm and human suffering not because of the direct effects but because people will use it as an excuse to continue using coal and other fossil fuels instead of investing in nuclear.

@funkdaddy Rock on! That puts things in perspective in a way that normal people should be able to grasp. Radiation isn’t as bad as people think; you get a little bit just by living on Earth. Too much will kill you, but the same is true of water even though the human body has so much of it.

@jerv I certainly hope that the damage gets no worse than it is. But the Daiichi Plant accident is already on a par with the one at Three Mile Island. The earthquake did not break the containment structures, but subsequent hydrogen explosions blew the entire roof off one and a gaping hole in another. The release of radiation subsequent to those breeches was on a par with that of the partial meltdown that the Three Mile Island reactor sustained. A recent study of long-term health effects found that the death rates for infants, children, and the elderly soared in the first two years after the Three Mile Island accident in Dauphin and surrounding counties.

The Diablo Canyon Plant in California is 3 miles from a fault line, and is perched on the edge of a cliff. If you recall the May 2008 Sichuan quake in China, it was estimated at 7.9 to 8 Magnitude, but it caused massive death and damage due to landslides because it was in a mountainous area. Should the side of the cliff the Diablo Canyon reactor sits on slide 85 feet down into the canyon, it is highly likely the resulting release would be equal to or greater than that at Chernobyl.

The Chernobyl disaster killed 65 workers and immediate residents in the first two weeks. 300,00 people had to be permanently relocated. Even with the relocation, death rates for infants and children remain incredibly high. Rates of childhood thyroid cancer run 500 times higher than the world average.

Given that the real cost, without massive government subsidies, for a KW hour of nuclear generated electricity is far higher than for conventional power plant costs, and that the spent fuel remains dangerous for many millennia and lacks any current method of safe disposal, I am not sold on the safety or necessity of nuclear power.

@ETproI am not so sure. Danger is everywhere, and by your logic, air travel should be banned due to the high risks, even despite the fact that cars kill more people.

Don’t get me wrong, there is tremendous risk, but how well would the Hoover Dam withstand a 9.0 quake and the resulting tsunami? What sort of crap (and how much of it) do other forms of powerplant put into the air?

I am not convinced @jerv. Tsunamis have the potential to kill today’s people. Plutonium has the potential to kill people for the next 1000 generations. What right do we have to make decisions for the grandchildren of our grandchildren?

We cannot compare the Hoover Dam worst-case scenario with a nuclear holocaust worst case scenario. Plutonium is a radioactive poison that accumulates in bone marrow. It has got a half life of 24,000 years.

We don’t have to rely on coal if we take energy efficiency seriously. Natural gas can bridge the time till renewable energies are widespread. The rate of innovation is accelerating.

Playing down the closeness of the Fukushima incident to disastrous maximum credible accidents is irresponsible. Besides, we are not out of the woods yet. One of the reactor cores might still lose containment. One of the spent fuel pool might still pose a more serious problem.

@mattbrowne Look at how much land is now underwater. You may build your house there, but I don’t have gills. As for “thousands of years”, we’ve already discussed that. Besides, history has proven that non-nuclear pollution has already made far more land permanently uninhabitable than even Chernobyl.

Natural gas has enough other issues that I remain skeptical. Efficiency takes time and money, so it’s still a ways off.

As for making decisions for future generations, have you ever seen the US federal budget :D

@jerv Air travel is a poor analogy. It does not compare. If I need to travel cross country, air travel is not only the fastest way to do it, it is arguably one of the safest. All methods of transportation include risks, and air travel on commercial airliners is a low-risk travel method and also far faster then other methods and very reasonable in cost. Nuclear energy is a very costly method of generating power, and its relative safety includes the calculation of the risks of storing nuclear wastes which will remain dangerous for thousands of years. With only 40 years history of waste storage and a growing threat of international terrorism adding constantly to storage risks, I submit we can not currently calculate this risk with any accuracy.

There can be disasters fasr worse than Chernobyl @jerv. Mitigating the consequences of such disasters might be possible in 3–4 generations, if we get fusion to work. Transmutation could then render plutonium harmless. But what if it is dispersed over large areas of land? What if all this plutonium ends up in our oceans? Transmutation might be not practical in such cases.

@ETpro Did I mis-speak? I am aware that the odds of an accident are lower. Its just that the consequences are more severe, therefore more newsworthy, therefore people feel flying is more dangerous than driving even though statistics say otherwise.

@mattbrowne I have a few issues with the way nuclear power is implemented, but I am in favor of refining the technology and reforming a few things as opposed to just ditching the whole concept. I think we need more actinide incinerators for instance.
Personally I can’t wait until we get workable, cost-effective fusion going; fission is so last century!

@jerv I understand. The relative safety of various electrical generation systems is tough to accurately assess. Coal is quite dirty, and even with modern fly-ash arrestors, it leaves us with a massive pool of toxic sludge and the pollution from coal fired plants probably kills 2,000 Americans per year. Oil is moderately dirty, but cleaner than coal. Both coal and oil are heavy drivers of global warming and the risks of it are not yet well defined. By the time they are, defined the knowledge will be largely academic, as the damage will be done. Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. But gas power plants, as well as all other kinds including nuclear plants can explode. There is no free ride. Even wind and tide generation have environmental footprints..

But nuclear seems inherently risky to me in that when things do go wrong, as all human endeavors will, the damage can spread so very far and last so very long. And things going wrong has to include the storage or radioactive wastes that remain dangerous for 10,000 years and might be stolen by terrorist to make things go very terribly wrong.

My favored solution is to fund and deploy a smart grid with wind, tidal and solar energy feeding into it and use natural gas as a stopgap while that transition proceeds. Yes, it would cost a lot. It would also put everyone to work and move us to an energy system we control and that gives us virtually free power in the future.

@ETpro Considering what can be (and has been!) done with diesel fuel and fertilizer, two far more common things, I remain unconvinced that the threat is any greater than the threats we already face on that count either.

Yes, I am just a ray of fucking sunshine :D

As for the waste, there are ways to make it break down much quicker. If nothing else, convert some old warheads and other Plutonium into fuel for a CANDU-type reactor.

@jervSunshine right back atcha Reprocessing and subduction burial are both potential ways of dealing with spent fuel. The problem is that both these methods, given current technology, take a power generation method that is grossly expensive per KW hour and kick its cost straight through the roof. And still, the threat of a massive radiation release is not altogether mitigated.

@jerv Sure the cost of bread will rise like leavened dough. But will it catch up with the cost of white truffles? What we are talking about is the relative cost. Silver is a precious metal, and it’s risen in cost with inflation, but it has never gained on the price of gold. Gas, hydro, wind and tide are relatively inexpensive ways to generate electricity in cost per KW hour. Nuclear energy is by far the most expensive way we have. And the relative spread won’t be changed by inflation.

@ETpro How much did a computer cost a few years ago? How does that compare to now? See how technology can change some things? You are correct, of course, but what about the cost of the land those things are on (or the ocean space they take up)? That may make those things undesirable, impractical, or maybe even impossible in some locations if for no reason other than kw/acre.
Then again, at this rate, we probably won’t be able to afford to pay attention in a couple of years.

@jerv Nuclear plants have had 40 years to climb down the cost curve. Let’s review how it’s going. In 1970 the Diablo Canyon Plant I’ve been complaining about was originally estimated to cost $320 million. PG&E said that fault lines in its area had not moved in 100,000 years, and probably in millions of years. Then in 1971 a new fault line was discovered off shore, just 3 miles from the plant. No problem, PG&E said. We can upgrade for seismic activity. The cost went from $320 mill to $5 billion. Ten years later, someone realized that when they made the seismic upgrades, they read the blueprints backwards, and all the reinforcement had to be redone. That added another $2.2 billion. Total cost now $7.2 billion.

Three years ago, they discovered another previously unknown fault 1 mile from the plant. The state Nuclear Regulatory Agency wants a 3D scan of the fault, but that has yet to be done. After learning that for 18 months the plant operated without anyone realizing that all the backup cooling pumps had frozen valves and would not have worked, the Republican state senator from that district is now pushing for suspension of operation till that 3D scan can be done. Cost of downtime for a nuclear plant? $1 million a day. How’s that falling computer price analogy working for ya?

Perhaps some massive breakthrough like cold fusion will happen some day and technology will bring the costs down. But till it does, using billions in taxpayer funds to subsidize this industry so it can compete with the KW Hr. costs of other power generation methods only makes sense if you have a financial stake in the industry.

@ETpro I spent much of my childhood and a fair chunk of my adult life watching The Big Dig in Boston. Your point? If you think nuclear plants have a monopoly on that sort of thing, I am going to laugh my ass off and wear it for a hat! Vermont Yankee seems to have avoided those issues fairly well, so I think we need a wider data set before drawing any conclusions. BTW, what are the inflation-adjusted numbers? I mean, if you go far enough back, $320M adjusted for inflation exceeds $7,2B, and I believe that $1(1970) is around $6(2011). Your point is still somewhat valid, but slightly diminished by inflated numbers.

I agree that research into newer, better, yadayada beats subsidies any day, and I think you might remember me saying that I was unimpressed with teh way nuclear power is done but not to the point where I feel we should just ditch it and go solar/wind/geothermal/tidal until some unfunded technological advance magically occurs.

@jerv You seem determined to find a reason cost overruns aren’t real. The cost of the Diablo plant went from $320 million to $5 billion in 1 year. That isn’t inflation. It was due to the added expense of dealing with the proximity of an active fault line. Likewise the additional $2.2 billion spent ten years later, while in inflated dollars compared to 1970, was still real money,

@ETpro No, just not as bad as you say they are. Sensationalism may sway the emotions of people willing to be swayed, but also undermines your credibility when dealing with those who don’t already agree with you or are a bit more stubborn, or just plain skeptical “Devil’s Advocate” types like me.

Natural Gas and Coal have their own issues with fuel supply and emissions. Wind isn’t universally practical, though I would like to see more wind farms anyways just on general principle. Ideally, I would like to see fission plants disappear altogether to be honest, but I don’t see it happening for a long time.

Until then though, we have a lot of avenues to explore, and I believe that nuclear is a viable one. Look at how they have advanced in the last fifty years and then look me in the eye and tell me that there is no longer any room for improvement in safety, efficiency, or cost.

@jerv I have been careful to research my statements, back them up with links, and avoid hyperbole. I am sorry if you interpreted all thsi work to be “sensationalism/” Nowhere in this discussion did I argue that technological development should stop. Right now, natural gas is abundantly available in the US and low in cost. Wind farms ar practical in a few areas now, but with the deployment of a smart grid, they could supply 100% of our power needs for the foreseeable future. Solar will soon add to that, and again needs smart grid for maximum efficiency. We get enough solar energy each day to meet our power needs for a year. Gas I see as a stopgap, because many of our nuclear plants are nearing their pahse out date per their design specs.

@ETpro And how much would it cost to implement a smart grid? I agree that it would be a good thing regardless of where/how we get the electricity to put into it, but as you might imagine, I am also skeptical that it will happen in my lifetime. I mean, we have wars to pay for, companies to bail out, execs to over-pay… we can’t afford to do anything that makes sense!
You have done a great job so far, so I was actually a bit surprised to see artificially high numbers from someone who I know to normally be precise. Maybe you got so into it that you missed that detail?
Yes, many of our current plants are old tech, but so is the ‘85 Corolla that I keep around because it still works and would be expensive to replace. I know Vermont Yankee just got another extension though, and I am pretty sure it isn’t the only plant that will stick around for a few more decades despite the introduction of newer, sleeker, sexier reactors.

@jerv I don’t know what the projected costs are, but we have to do something about the aging grid we have anyway. And just replacing it piecemeal with no upgrade does nothing to protect against the solar flare that will take out the enture grid someday. What is the cost of the Entire USA being without any power for months or years?

@ETpro As near as I can tell, it would cost less to let everything fail than it would to use our brains and our wallets to do the right thing.

There were times when the power went out at my old place and I wondered why there wasn’t an alternate circuit or twenty like the electrical system on a Kitty Hawk-class carrier (Gawd, all the different ways to route power in the event of a casualty…) and if they can’t/won’t even solve a problem like that despite the consequences, what makes you think that they will do smart grids?

@jerv Ha! Did I say I thought they would build a smart grid? A Republican House. They recognize that you build success by never investing in anything and constantly reducing revenues to shore up the bottom line.

@jerv Well I hope God is so impressed that She decides to pay off our national debt. The Republican plan to acomplish that through successive tax cuts has been singularly unsuccessful. Maybe it kicks in after we get revenues down below zero.

@RareDenver The news yeaterday and today certainly doesn’t justify the rosy picture this article paints. At least one reactor core appears to be breached. And if radiation levels become high enough die to that breach, workers will have to withdraw and at least three reactors will experience complete meltdown of their spent fule pools.